Influence of Oceanic Boundary Conditions in Simulations of Antarctic Climate and Surface Mass Balance Change during the Coming Century

Abstract This article reports on high-resolution (60 km) atmospheric general circulation model simulations of the Antarctic climate for the periods 1981–2000 and 2081–2100. The analysis focuses on the surface mass balance change, one of the components of the total ice sheet mass balance, and its impact on global eustatic sea level. Contrary to previous simulations, in which the authors directly used sea surface boundary conditions produced by a coupled ocean–atmosphere model for the last decades of both centuries, an anomaly method was applied here in which the present-day simulations use observed sea surface conditions, while the simulations for the end of the twenty-first century use the change in sea surface conditions taken from the coupled simulations superimposed on the present-day observations. It is shown that the use of observed oceanic boundary conditions clearly improves the simulation of the present-day Antarctic climate, compared to model runs using boundary conditions from a coupled climate ...